Shanghai Love

In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh explores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that emerged was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated by other women as they emerged from the "inner quarters" of traditional Chinese society. Many Chinese visitors and sojourners were drawn to the Foreign Settlements. Men of letters seeking a living outside of the government bureaucracy found work in the Settlements’ burgeoning print industry and formed the new class of urban intellectuals. Courtesans fled from oppressive treatment and the turmoil of uprisings elsewhere in China and found unprecedented freedom in Shanghai to redefine themselves and their profession. As the entertainment industry developed, publications sprang up to report on and promote it. Journalists and courtesans found that their interests increasingly coincided, and the Settlements became a cosmopolitan playground. Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public, they introduced modern notions of love and romance that were radically at odds with the traditional roles of men and women. Yet because social change arrived in the form of entertainment, it met with little resistance. Yeh shows how this fortuitous combination of people and circumstances, rather than official decisions or acts, created the first multicultural modern city in China. With illustrations from newspapers, novels, travel guides, and postcards, as well as contemporary written descriptions of life in foreign-driven, fast-paced, cutting-edge Shanghai, this study traces the mutual influences among courtesans, intellectuals, and the city itself in creating a modern, market-oriented leisure culture in China. Historians, literary specialists, art critics, and social scientists will welcome this captivating foray into the world of late nineteenth-century popular culture.

Henry Winkler - actor, producer, writer - praised this debut novel: "Two cultures collide in a romantic brew of herbs and heart. Layne Wong creates a compelling tale." Shanghai Love is a gripping drama about the unlikely relationship that develops between a Chinese herbalist and a Jewish refugee in China during World War II. Peilin is betrothed to Kwan Yao, the only son of a wealthy pearl farmer. However, months before their wedding, Yao is killed by the Japanese in the Nanjing Massacre. The Kwans insist on proceeding with the wedding and beautiful Peilin is married to a ghost husband. When an uncle passes away, Peilin is sent to Shanghai to manage the Kwan family herbal shop. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Henri graduates from medical school just as Hitler rises to power and unleashes the horrible history of prejudice and violence against the Jewish population. Fleeing the Holocaust to the one place that would accept him without a visa, Henri escapes to Shanghai where he's befriended by Ping, a young disfigured rickshaw driver. Ping introduces Henri to his sister Peilin. Through her kindness, Henri becomes fascinated with Chinese herbs as well as the exotic culture surrounding him. Shanghai Love is a classic romance fiction that handsomely showcases love's triumph over adversity. Visit Laynewong.com to learn more. Order your copy from Amazon today!

Go beyond the glitz, glamour, and bustle of one of the most populated cities on the planet and discover the real heartbeat and soul of Shanghai—its people. Through this collection of 100 mostly full-color photographs captured by a team of passionate artists and photographers, Faces We Love Shanghai takes you on a journey through the city’s narrow alleyways and secluded backstreets. Each photograph reveals an untold story, showcasing the beauty and joy behind the everyday moments and people that are often overlooked. Also featured in the book are photographs of a community working together as a team, supporting one another in a time of tremendous stress and anxiety, as COVID-19 swept the globe and the world pointed its finger at China. In a world divided, this stunning photography book cuts through the language barriers and cultural divide to bring you a work of pure craftsmanship—a collection that shows the true beauty of capturing people as they really are. Highlighting the raw and honest moments of life in Shanghai that are at times heartbreaking and hopeful, serendipitous and authentic, Faces We Love Shanghai is a love letter to a city visited by many but truly seen by few.

From award-winning and bestselling author Taras Grescoe comes a highly compelling new book about the twilight of Shanghai before the Second World War Finalist for the 2016 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction Longlisted for the 2017 British Columbia's National Award for Non-Fiction On the eve of the Second World War, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the 20th century’s most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon. Emily Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, and play an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, “Mickey” Hahn had just arrived in Shanghai nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. After entering Sassoon’s glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton and the colourful gangster named Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, who had once lived in Saskatoon and Edmonton and later retired to Montreal. When she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees - a place her innate curiosity will lead her to discover first-hand. But danger lurks on the horizon and Mickey barely makes it out alive as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists come to power in China. Taras Grescoe, with his trademark style and verve, brings this rich history to life in all its beautiful and intimate detail.

For many in the west, "Shanghai" is the quintessence of East Asian modernity, whether imagined as glamorous and exciting, corrupt and impoverishing, or a complex synthesis of the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did "Shanghai" acquire this power? How did people across China and around the world decide that Shanghai was the place to be? Mediasphere Shanghai shows that partial answers to these questions can be found in the products of Shanghai’s media industry, particularly the Shanghai novel, a distinctive genre of installment fiction that flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s. Shanghai fiction supplies not only the imagery that we now consider typical of the city, but, more significantly, the very forms—simultaneity, interruption, mediation, and excess—through which the city could be experienced as a business and entertainment center and envisioned as the focal point of a mediasphere with a national and transnational reach. Existing paradigms of Shanghai culture tend to explain the city’s distinctive literary and visual aesthetics as merely the predictable result of economic conditions and social processes, but Alexander Des Forges maintains that literary texts and other cultural products themselves constitute a conceptual foundation for the city and construct the frame through which it is perceived. Working from a wide range of sources, including installment fiction, photographs, lithographic illustrations, maps, guidebooks, newspapers, and film, Des Forges demonstrates the significant social effects of aesthetic forms and practices. Mediasphere Shanghai offers a new perspective on the cultural history of the city and on the literature and culture of modern China in general.

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on representations of Shanghai, a contested location within political discourse and cultural imagination. Shanghai's complex history as a quasi-colonial city, and its contradictory identity as the birthplace of Communist China and the epitome of twenty-first-century capitalism, make it an especially fascinating subject. Contributors examine representations of Shanghai in film, art, literature, memoir, theater, and mass media from the past one hundred years. They address the ways in which texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rewritten past and present Shanghai to reflect our own wishes and anguishes, show how the city resists static interpretations, and challenge notions of authentic representation and identity. By revealing and questioning persistent stereotypes and constructed versions of East and West, the essays offer diverse views so as to create a genuine exchange with contemporary global audiences. A wide variety of texts are discussed, including the films Street Angel (1937) and The White Countess (2005), and the novels The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) and Shanghai Baby (1999).

The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city. To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

This book focuses on urban development in Shanghai over the past four decades, which is composed of two major development processes—the development of new spaces and the renewal of old ones. Seeking to bring the concept of space back into social analysis, the book explores changes affecting communities, interpersonal interactions, lifestyles and social mindsets in Shanghai from a spatial perspective. What’s more, all these social themes are presented using a narrative of spatial representation and spatialization. The book combines both academic and documentary-style contributions. It also provides cutting-edge research on the most representative case in Shanghai. As the book demonstrates, the story of social spaces in Shanghai is more than a combination of social analysis and spatial analysis but also involves historical analysis and contemporary narrative.